SolidWorks Syncs Electrical, Mechanical Design Silos

Showing a commitment to stamping out one of the biggest barriers to product development, SolidWorks has released a family of electrical applications designed to break down traditional design siloes and connect mechanical and electrical engineering teams.

The SolidWorks Electrical family includes a system-level 2D schematic design tool and a powerful 3D electrical modeling add-in for the standard SolidWorks CAD tool, linked together in real-time. SolidWorks CEO Bertrand Sicot said more than half its customers require a solution that streamlines collaboration between mechanical and electrical system engineers.

"Virtually every product you see today has more and more electrical and electronic content," Eric Leafquist, product manager at SolidWorks, told us. "Most products have computer chips, displays, even intelligence, but the unsung hero is the set of connections between the microprocessor and the device doing the job, whether it's a simple children's toy or a more sophisticated product."

By integrating the worlds of electrical and mechanical design, SolidWorks is aiming to facilitate design changes and early collaboration -- both of which are essential to breaking down the siloes that have hampered delivery cycles and opened doors to potential quality problems. Leafquist said the real-time connections between the 2D electrical schematics and the 3D mechanical models help streamline the design phase, reduce product delays, and result in more consistent and standardized designs, not to mention lower overall product development costs.

The new offerings include SolidWorks Electrical, a 2D schematic tool for electrical system architecture and planning. It allows for more accurate creation of schematics with a library of more than 500,000 standard electrical parts. The complementary tool, SolidWorks Electrical 3D, is an add-in for the SolidWorks CAD package that connects the 2D systems-level schematics capability to the 3D models in real-time. It allows bidirectional updates between 2D and 3D to synchronize electromechanical designs, helping to maintain consistency throughout the development process. It also helps standardize designs and unifies the electrical and mechanical bill of materials -- another factor Leafquist cited in reducing mistakes and delays. The ability to place the electrical system, cables, and wiring in the 3D model also facilitates planning of specific locations and paths for consistent product manufacturing.

In addition, the company is offering the SolidWorks Electrical Professional bundle, which combines both capabilities in a single application for users who cross the 2D and 3D areas of electrical development. Technology for this application and the rest of the new offerings hails from Trace Software, a SolidWorks partner whose elecworks tool is integrated with the SolidWorks environment.

Though SolidWorks Premium already could add routing, harnesses, wires, and tubes into a 3D model, it did not previously offer up-front 2D system schematics or real-time integration between the 2D schematic and the 3D model. "Traditionally, the design has been very much a disjointed approach," Leafquist said. "The electrical department was literally separate in terms of the department and the tool set. With this, everything is highly integrated."

From what I hear from engineers and the vendors like SolidWorks, the two domains don't work completely in isolation (that would be impossible in today's day and age of highly complex products), but the tools are not anywhere close to integrated thus requiring a lot of manual passing back and forth of data and no where near in real time. Those traditional workflows with non-integrated tools open the door for a lot of mistakes and omissions--all of which lead to potential design problems. The idea between these integrated tool sets is to minimize those inconsistencies and get everyone on the same page.

Beth, that makes perfect sense. Do you have any idea how this is going from a change management point of view? I would guess that the senior engineers are not as bullish on the collaboration tools as the younger engineers who probably worked with collaboration tools during their college years.

The real issue today is that engineering organizations really can't afford to stay stuck in the same types of over-the-wall collaboration processes and siloed tools. There are too many interdependencies in designs and so much integration required that trying to put systems together at the end of the development cycle is far too risky in terms of meeting rigorous time-to-market schedules, not to mention, incurring the cost of expensive tooling or late-stage design changes.

Yes, collaboration usually has to become company policy in order to make sure it occurs. People otherwise would continue to stay with their old habits. I worked for a company that required collaboration on research documents. Each person involved had to offer comments and sign off on each draft, which forced collaboration.

Absolutely correct, Rob. As with any of these design tools that promote multi-disciplinary collaboration, the tool is just the tool. It's the cultural and change management issues that are really the bigger hurdle.

I would imagine the tools themselves don't necessarily change the long-held behaviors. In the automation and control world, some of the vendors also provide change-mangement plans when the new technology requires behaviorial change.

@Rob: You raise a good point. The wall is still there, but many of the CAD tools (not just SolidWorks) have been making good strides to break down the walls. Problem has been that the even though the two worlds have existed forever and siloed tools been used forever, as products become more complex, it becomes harder and harder to do the design work in mechanical and electrical independently and avoid running into big, costly problems. Also, PLM platforms have capabilities for managing both kinds of data which is helping blend the silos.

Our electrical and mechanical designs have worked togather for years. Those organizations that choose to allow empire building and isolation are suffering from a deffective culture. OF course, ours were always smaller organizations where the electrical and mechanical people were fairly close to each other, and casual discussions could be started at almost any time. In addition, we had similar goals, and the project leader would always start out a project with a meeting giving all of us a direction to start in. Also, we all had an input as to what the sales man would sell. So we had a headstart on what we would be doing.

Still the problem is getting the engineers to the prototype and prodution floor. They need to envision and comfirm how the techs assemble the product. I think new engineers should perhaps spend time assembling the product. Another venue is problem reporting. And perhaps the experence engineers should revist. I just had a bit of an education on how the techs decided to wye out a cable. Not how I would have done it. But is was faster and easier work. So now I design with additional flexibility as to how a cable is assemblied.

Given the fact that electrical and mechanical systems have been running together in products for decades, I'm suprised the design wall between electrical and mechanical still exists at all. Are there other products that also break down this wall?

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